Stop Making These YouTube Videos If You Want $10K+ Coaching Clients

My client Steve posted YouTube videos every single week. He had 20,000 subscribers and was getting tens of thousands of views per month on his channel, but was only making one sale of his course per month. He stopped making one type of YouTube video and 18 days later he had made 18 sales. Then he started closing sales about every other day from his YouTube content. Same channel, same offer, same dude. There are 5 types of videos coaches and course creators keep making that are quietly repelling the people who are actually going to pay to work with you or buy your course. And I'm gonna bet money you're making at least one of these videos. You're showing up on YouTube every single week and clients aren't showing up back. I've taught coaches and course creators to use YouTube as a sales asset for almost 10 years now, and it is how I close 4 and 5-figure clients from my own channel. And full disclosure, I have personally made every single video on this list. So in this video, I'm going to I'm gonna give you the 5 video types you need to stop making and what data my clients' channels say about each one of these videos and what to make instead so YouTube can start booking you clients and making you course sales every day. Before I share the list, you need to meet 2 people because every video that you ever publish is an invitation to one of them. Beginner Betty is just starting out. She watches everything, comments, "This was so helpful," binges your tutorials at 2:00 AM. She's lovely. She's DIYing everything. She's just getting started. She will never pay for your course or to work with you one-on-one. Then there's Expert Esther. She's your ready-to-buy viewer. And here's the thing, she's not the expert in your craft. She's just further along in her journey. And so she's been around. She started as Beginner Betty, did the work, grew, and now she's more advanced. She's got expensive problems. She understands now that she needs to pay someone to help her solve her problem. Betty wants free answers. Esther wants a guide. Every video on this list has the same flaw. It invites Beginner Betty and it repels Expert Esther. So as we go through these 5, ask yourself one question about your own channel. Who did my last video invite in? Let's start with the one that feels the most productive but pays the least. Riding news cycles, industry drama. In trending topics feels like a really good strategy because the numbers will really jump, views go up, impressions go up, and it gives you a dopamine hit that your video is performing so well. But trend traffic is broad by definition, and broad means most of those viewers won't ever become paying customer or client because generally these topics are around the wrong location, the wrong topic, the wrong problem. They're there for a headline. In my client audits, I found this exact pattern. A channel was pulling in hundreds of thousands of impressions every single month, but it was all around big news topics and almost none of it is convertible into a paying customer or client because the business serves a specific client that the news audience isn't. Now the reach is real, the revenue just doesn't exist. I actually walked through the whole case in another video and I'll point you to that video where I talk about how I audited 50 clients. Client channels and what I found at the end of this video. But this trending video is the same idea as a viral video. If somebody is telling you to learn their viral tricks or follow their viral video ideas, if you want to make actual sales and book clients from YouTube, run from that person as fast as you can because viral videos are not going to bring in paying customers or clients. Now, the test before you film a viral video or a trending topic is to ask yourself, will this exact viewer need me in 30 days? And can they hire me right now? Is it attracting the viewer at the right stage, right problem, right budget? Because a trend video is only worth making when the trend intersects with your buyer's expensive problem, like what an algorithm change means for coaches selling high ticket, not the actual change itself. Does that make sense? Let me know in the comments. Say viral if you're tracking what I'm saying. Another way to think of it, you want to think about trend views as rented. Expert Esther's attention is owned. You have to stop renting. Now this next one is the most common video type on struggling coaching clients, and it's the exact one Steve deleted from his strategy. Beginner tutorials or beginner topics are the comfort food for coaching channels. How to get started with X, 5 basic things for Y, 7 mistakes for, the 3 biggest hacks to. Yes, they will get you views. They will absolutely get you thank you comments or this was so good, and they will train both YouTube and your audience that your channel is for people at the start of their journey, the people with no budget and free answer expectations. As I mentioned, Steve runs a hormone channel. For a long time, his videos were beginner-level videos. The what is this, the how it works basics, great videos, but only bringing in one sale a month. Then he flipped it. He stopped following YouTuber advice. He started making videos for the advanced specific topics his actual customers bring to him, the stuff people are sweating through or, or up at night thinking about. That's when the 8 sales in 18 days happened, and it kept compounding for him. He was closing a new sale every other day. He didn't just get better at YouTube or create better thumbnails, he changed who his videos invited in. Open up your client call notes. And look at the questions your paying clients are asking. Those questions are your content list. The advanced level problem is the video you need to do. Now, Betty won't watch it, and that's the point. If your video could be answered by the first page of Google search results, it's a Betty video. You don't need more views even on Instagram. You need viewers with Esther's problem. Advanced content is the filter for every video that you decide to make. And look, the hard part is you can't always necessarily think who is this video is actually going to invite in. So I built a free custom GPT that's going to tell you before you film. It's called the Who's Watching GPT. You drop in your next video idea or your video title, and it tells you whether that video is going to attract a beginner Betty or an expert Esther. It's totally free. It's linked below. It's at trenalittle.com/whoswatching, and you can run your next couple of video ideas through it. But don't leave the video yet because the next two things are hiding somewhere sneakier than your topic. They're hiding in your titles. Titles like "How to Feel More Aligned with Your Business" or "Finding Safety and Slowing Down." The video underneath those titles may be great, might be genuinely transformational, but the title is going to make that video invisible because nobody in a buying moment types feelings into a search bar. Across all 50 of my clients' channels that I audited, the pattern was pretty brutal but consistent. Titles built on feeling words safety, alignment, capacity, stuck, all those types of words sat at about a 2% click-through rate and just about double-digit views, while titles naming concrete things on the very same channel got about 8% click-through rates and actually drove sales. Same person, same expertise, same channel, but the words decided everything. Before you decide on a title, count what I call wallet words. They're nouns, numbers, named tools, and named moments a buyer would actually type. If you've got zero wallet words, you've got to rethink that title. You need to translate the feeling into the moment it causes. So how to feel safe working less becomes the concrete thing that happened, like a revenue dip or the 60-hour work week or the launch that flopped. That's the moment they are searching into YouTube that's keeping them up at night because the buyer can't search for a feeling that she hasn't even named. She can search for the thing that happened last Tuesday. And the evil twin of the feeling title is the one that sounds smart, and that's the exact problem with it. This is the title written in your language instead of your potential buyer or client's language. Frameworks that you've named, clinical terms, industry vocabulary— yes, it proves your credentials. It also guarantees your viewer, or your ready-to-buy viewer, is going to scroll right by it because she hasn't learned your words yet. She knows her symptoms. She knows what she's dealing with, not your terminology for it. I coach clients on this consistently because one of the opportunities that my clients have is I will review every single title that they come up with before they even create a video or before they even post it on YouTube. And it's probably one of the biggest things that they use me for every single week. One client in particular kept titling viewers in practitioner language, the proper terms she would use with her peers, and her ideal viewer kept passing her by because the buyer was actually typing in raw symptom language into search at like 11 PM. The plain, slightly desperate words that you would maybe say to a friend, but not the term that you'd learn in your certification. So you need to steal your title language from your buyer's mouth, whether that's the discovery calls that you're doing, the DM conversations that you're having, the intake forms that you have, the comment section of bigger channels in your niche. When she says, I can't stop snapping at my kids, you title it nervous system dysregulation, you're losing both people. Her words in the title, your framework in the video, right? Think about it. You're giving a medicine to a dog, right? You coat the medicine with peanut butter. You need to give them what they think they need. And then inside the video is what they actually need. Jargon is absolutely going to flatter the expert, but symptoms, specific symptoms will find your buyer. Now, this one's going to really sting because it's what everybody tells you to do. Short feel like the low-cost way into YouTube. Quick to make, views come fast, the platform pushes them, and maybe you're just taking them from the Reel or the TikTok you're doing anyway, so it adds no extra time for you. But a Short is a drive-by. It's 60 seconds of a stranger scrolling past you at like midnight or in the pickup line or at soccer practice. There's no context, no offer, no path to anything. Shorts views are honestly the most empty calories on the YouTube platform. And I saw this on the clients' channels that I was auditing. Thousands and thousands of Shorts views, and those scroll-by viewers never once landed anywhere near an offer, let alone a long-form video. It's all this motion and no pipeline. Meanwhile, the sales on the clients that were making money every single day from YouTube were coming entirely from long-form videos. Some of them doing it with videos that had less than 100 views. While the Shorts channels looked busier, the long-form channels were the ones getting paid. What's more important for you, views or sales? Type that down in the comments. But when it comes to Shorts, order matters. You've got to build the long-form strategy that converts people first, the videos that actually meet Expert Esther's expensive problem and then hand her the next step, buying your course, working with you. Then if you want to chop those good videos that did work into Shorts as like garnish that points back to the meal, the long-form video, then you can do Shorts. Shorts are for repurposing and should never be the strategy on YouTube. Don't look at Shorts views as progress. They're, they're not even on the scoreboard for people who are using YouTube as a business owner. Yes, a Short can make you more visible and increase your discoverability, but only long-form videos are going to make you money. Now I need you to understand YouTube can start booking you clients literally next week when you stop making YouTuber videos and start making client-attracting videos. Steve didn't wait a year. 8 sales in 18 days from the same channel from what it was doing a month before. If you wanna know what are the 5 things that you need to do on a YouTube channel right now, whether you are getting started or whether you need to fix your YouTube channel, watch the video that's on your screen right now because I'm giving you all 5 of those things inside.